MEET THE TWO SEAMUS HEANEYS

Author: By Patti Hartigan, Globe Staff

Date: Saturday, November 4, 1995
Page: 21
Section: LIVING

The problem with all the attention is that it requires him to be two people at once -- the poet and the "Poet," if you will. But when he finally settles down for a midmorning chat in his study at Harvard's Widener Library, the man is welcoming and warm. "It's not really an office, it's a roost," he says apologetically, ushering a visitor into a modest room at Harvard, where he is a professor. The walls are bare, the furnishings standard collegiate issue. But when Heaney speaks, his mellifluous lilt seems to transform the bare space into a cozy pub in some sleepy seaside village. A peat fire burns, and the man with the white hair gears up to tell stories.

He begins with Greece. "We passed from Argos into Arcadia . . ." A pause to marvel over the magic of those words. "That sounds like something out of Homer. But when we crossed from Argos into Arcadia, the road was covered with apples. It just happened. Obviously, a box of apples had fallen off a lorry, but it was such an omen of plenitude. This was on Wednesday. On Friday, I realized the omen had been fulfilled."

Heaney, 56, was in the port village of Pylos that Friday, touring antiquity with Harvard colleague Dimitri Hadzi. The Pylos stop provided a chance to sit still, dream by the water. That day, after taking a bath "like a Homeric hero," Heaney called his son Christopher in Dublin.

After hearing the news, Heaney handed the phone to his wife, Marie. ''Afterwards, I realized some aesthetic sensor in me said, 'You cannot possibly speak a sentence that begins, "I have won the Nobel Prize." ' That would be scandalous."

Scandalous -- but true. When the Swedish Academy bestows the prestigious award, it doesn't warn the recipients about the madness and mayhem that accompanies the honor. Take Heaney's return to Cambridge. He was here yesterday to read at a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Harvard's art museums, but since he won the award, what would have been a nice, pleasant occasion turned into a major media event.

Yet Heaney himself has always eschewed the glitter part of the literati scene. "I just publish my books and do my readings, and a certain amount of fallout -- or whatever you want to call it -- has come my way. I never sought it."

The man is obviously more comfortable in green tweed than black tie. The attention is almost eerie. "I mean, the strangest moment in your life is when you move from being your own inchoate self to being a textual presence, when you move from being Seamus Heaney to being Seamus Heaney in inverted commas, you know? This composite identity that's not yourself begins to stalk you. And I've been living with a stalker for 30 or 40 years."

The stalker has haunted him in Dublin, where he lives half of the year, and in Cambridge, where he teaches during the spring semester. Yet somehow, the cult of celebrity is less threatening back home in a land where everybody knows everybody and everyone is famous, be it the playboy of the Western world or a guest of the nation. "In Ireland, we are poised to deflect attention, but to expect it at the same time."

Heaney has celebrated the spirit of that place in poems that dig deep into the native soil: His verse mines beauty from the history of his troubled homeland. The son of a Roman Catholic farmer from Northern Ireland has also written passionate poems about the bloody civil war that has divided his country. Yet as such, he fears that any comments he makes in conjunction with the Nobel Prize will be distilled into soundbites and headlines about the ongoing, yet tenuous peace process.

"The word 'process' is uneasy, anyway," he explains. "It makes it seem as if it has begun and can't stop. It makes it sound as if it's functioning organically toward a predestined outcome, you know, even though it's pretty perilous and depends on human ingenuity."

He talks about the peace negotiations the way he might talk about literature. "It's like the evolution of any work of art," he says. "The cease-fire gave us the sine qua non, a trust that something should be changed, a little inspiration, a hint of possibility. But after that excitement has worn off, what's next? In artistic terms, it's technique and the ability to keep things on the move. That always depends on a total alertness and total commitment."

Heaney applies that same philosophy to teaching, which he takes very seriously. "For a good class, you need to be as fit as an athlete," the poet says. "You need to be on the balls of your imagined toes, dancing out like a champion."

That won't change: He will continue to teach at Harvard. As for the $1 million check that comes with the Nobel, he adds, "I haven't thought about it yet. I find myself incapable of thinking about it."

His name -- in inverted commas -- has been on the short list of potential Nobel laureates for years. "It was very embarrassing every time it came up," he says. "It was as if someone had mentioned sex in front of their mammy, you know?"

But now that it has actually happened, his fame exacerbates his sense of being two people at once. There's the man who gets up every morning, brushes his teeth and writes his poems. Then there's the man answering questions in his office, telling tales in his inimitable way but knowing full well it's all on the record. "The beginning of celebration is the beginning of execration," he says, winding down. The words resonate in the office, and ''Seamus Heaney" stops speaking. The other man, the poet without the inverted commas, leaves quietly and walks off in the morning rain.

GILLIS;11/03 CAWLEY;11/06,20:26 HEANRO04